Songs for doing the washing-up: domestic pop and the small life

Almost all the music we listen to, we listen to while doing something else. Washing up, folding clothes, waiting for the water to boil, hanging out a load of laundry with your phone propped on the edge of the sink. The big scenes in music, the gig, the packed dance floor, the car on the motorway at night, take up a tiny fraction of real life. The rest is kitchen, hallway, bus and sofa.

I like to think of my songs in that setting. Less on a stage, more on someone's kitchen counter. There's something very honest about a song playing while somebody scrubs a frying pan. It doesn't have to convince anyone of its importance. It just has to keep them company.

The big and the small

Pop has a natural pull towards the grandiose. Loves that change everything, break-ups that end the world, nights you'll never forget. I adore that kind of pop, and copla, which influences me so much, also lives on drama with a capital D. But I've realised that what I most want to write about is on a different scale. The row over who takes the bins out. The boyfriend who falls asleep on the sofa with the telly on. The neighbour who keeps tabs on your comings and goings. The diet you start every Monday.

That's what I call, half joking, domestic pop. Songs about everyday life that don't try to turn it into something else. A title like «La vecina cotilla» ("The nosy neighbour"), for example, doesn't ask anyone to become a metaphor for social control or anything of the sort. The neighbour is enough. A window, a landing, someone who's always there. If you then want to read something deeper into it, wonderful. But the title stands up without that.

Titles like «No quiero otro novio cojín» ("I don't want another cushion boyfriend") or «La dieta del cucurucho» ("The ice-cream-cone diet") come from the same place. They're homely titles. They could be things said in a kitchen, to a friend, with a fork in your hand. I think that closeness is why they work: they don't ask you to dress up to listen to them.

The small life of a gay couple

There's one more reason to write like this, and it has to do with what's missing. For a long time, when popular culture told stories about gay men, it nearly always told them at their most extreme moments. The secret, the conflict, the tragedy, the party. Important moments, no doubt. But a gay couple's life is also made of shopping lists, arguments over the remote, Sundays with no plans. And hardly anyone was writing songs about that.

Odd as it may sound, I think writing songs about the boring stuff is political. Saying that gay love has its routine too, its quirks, its Tupperware in the fridge. The extraordinary already has its songs. The ordinary has far fewer. And it's in the ordinary that most of us spend most of our time, whoever we are.

With PLANETA GAYFOLK I try to cover both halves. Pride and liberation feature in the trilogy, above all in «El día de la liberación» ("Liberation day"), which closes the story of the three albums. But in between there are plenty of kitchen-and-landing songs. I like them living side by side. Even on liberation day, someone has to do the washing-up afterwards.

Writing for a distracted ear

Thinking that my songs will be heard while someone's doing something else changes the way I write. A distracted ear doesn't follow a complicated story. It fishes out loose phrases. It hangs on to a chorus, a name, a joke. If the song asks for too much attention, it gets skipped.

That's why I take great care that every lyric has two or three moments that work on their own, without context. A line that makes you smile even if you didn't hear what came before. A twist you can get with half your mind on the frying pan. It isn't easy, and I don't always pull it off. But when it works, the song slips into someone's life without asking permission, which is the best thing that can happen to a small song.

At the same time, I want anyone who does pay attention to find more. That's why I post every lyric in full on my website, on its own page, in case one day you fancy sitting down to read what you used to hear while washing up. I love imagining someone who's heard a song fifty times in the kitchen finally reading the lyrics one day and finding a line they'd never caught. That moment feels like a little prize for both of us.

I do have one doubt about all this. Sometimes I wonder whether domestic pop is a way of settling. Whether writing about the small life is a choice or a way of not taking risks. Big songs are scarier, because they can fail big.

I think the honest answer is that it's a bit of both. I'm comfortable with the small, and that comfort has its lazy side. But I also believe the small, told well, is harder than it looks. An everyday detail has to be very well chosen not to sound like filler. Getting a laugh out of a washing machine takes more craft than moving people with a farewell on a station platform.

What I'm fairly sure of: I wouldn't want to write only for special occasions. Most of life isn't special, and it deserves music all the same. Days with nothing to report have a soundtrack too, even if nobody picks it with care. If one of my songs is playing while someone tidies the kitchen on a Tuesday night and that person smiles, even without noticing, the song has done its job.

And if you want to give it a go, all 273 singles can be downloaded for free, one by one, at mikesaintlouis.com/descargas/singles. The dishes are up to you.